Drought-proofing Southern California — the topic of a two-day symposium at Caltech — elicited numerous ideas from some of the top water thinkers in the world. The suggestions were music to the ears of Felicia Marcus, chairwoman of the State Water Resources Control Board, who said it is going to take a combination of projects from urban, suburban and agricultural users in order to increase water supplies in the arid Golden State.

“The answer is a mix of solutions: conservation, recycling, storm-water capture and desalination,” said Marcus, who kicked off the conference Monday.

After four of the driest years in California history, Southern California has received 40 fewer inches of rain than average, dropping ground-water basins to record levels and state reservoirs to about 54 percent. Since Southern California gets about 30 percent of its water from the State Water Project in the San Joaquin-Sacramento River Delta, the lack of snowpack cinched off that supply. Scientists say the snowpack may be the lowest in 500 years.

But the drought of the century, as Marcus called it, could get worse because of increased use of water by the state’s farmers and a growing state population. Even with predictions of a strong El Niño that could bring above-average amounts of rain this winter, Marcus said the storms may be warm, hit mostly Southern California and not dump snow in the Sierras of Northern California.

Many of the speakers Monday focused on ground water. Parts of Southern California with aquifers — the Inland Empire, San Gabriel Valley, San Fernando Valley and the South Bay — could act as reservoirs for storm water and recycled sewage water.

“Our ground water basins are the largest potential sources of (water) storage in the state,” Marcus said.

Famiglietti, of NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in La Canada Flintridge, said satellite images show a rapid decrease in ground water, particularly in the Central Valley where farmers are tapping new wells without regulations to stop them in what Marcus and others described as “the Wild West” of water.

As a result, California has lost 4 trillion gallons of ground water each year for the last four years, equal to the amount of water used by 38 million Californians per year, Famiglietti told the audience. “Yeah, we’ve got a drought, but this is superimposed on top of chronic water shortages.”

Marcus said new regulations on previously unregulated groundwater basins are prompting discussions among farmers to cut back. “It is starting already,” she said, even though the new law doesn’t require a ground-water plan for 2 1/2 years. “Farmers talking to farmers is absolutely the way you get faster change.”

In urban Southern California, Sedlak said the region could ween itself off imported water and become self-sustaining. “The more interesting questions are ‘Do we want to? And how much is it going to cost?”

San Diego County’s desalination plant will produce water at $1,000 an acre-foot because of high energy costs, when most agencies pay between $100 and $600. The cost of treating wastewater and pumping it through “purple pipes” to ballfields, golf courses and cemeteries is costly, too, because both major treatment plants in L.A. County are downstream, requiring electricity to pump recycled water into L.A. and its suburbs, he said. Instead, Sedlak proposes mini recycling plants strategically placed on top of groundwater basins so the cleaned water could be pumped back into the aquifers as storage. Direct potable reuse is being practiced in the Water Replenishment District in the South Bay and in Orange County, he said.

Shoemaker of Pasadena-based Tetra Tech is working with cities to produce new cisterns to catch storm water, bioswales and permeable parking lots to allow seepage into aquifers.

She estimates Los Angeles County can capture 50 percent of all its storm water, or about 150 billion gallons, enough to meet 55 percent of the county’s residential demand.

Steve Scauzillo covers environment and transportation for the Southern California News Group. He has won two journalist of the year awards from the Angeles Chapter of the Sierra Club and is a recipient of the Aldo Leopold Award for Distinguished Editorial Writing on environmental issues. Steve studied biology/chemistry when attending East Meadow High School and Nassau College in New York (he actually loved botany!) and then majored in social ecology at UCI until switching to journalism. He also earned a master's degree in media from Cal State Fullerton. He has been an adjunct professor since 2005. Steve likes to take the train, subway and bicycle – sometimes all three – to assignments and the newsroom. He is married to Karen E. Klein, a former journalist with Los Angeles Daily News, L.A. Times, Bloomberg and the San Fernando Valley Business Journal and now vice president of content management for a bank. They have two grown sons, Andy and Matthew. They live in Pasadena. Steve recently watched all of “Star Trek” the remastered original season one on Amazon, so he has an inner nerd.